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Comment by andrewaylett | Hacker News Reader

The ROI is measured in units of "care". As in: do you care more about the people involved (who themselves have expressed a desire for people to respect their name), or about the foundation having a specific name?

I'm all for the rename. Call it the ASF, update references in documents the next time we touch them.

It's very much the same discussion as master/main for branches, or Andrew/Andy for me: if I care enough to ask people to respect my name, people who wish to care for those around them will take care to respect my choice of name.

Changing the foundation's name is very obviously not going to undo any of the injustices that have been done over the years, but if we care about the people involved so little that we won't even stop using their name for something unrelated to them when they ask nicely then how can they (or anyone else) possibly think we'd do the right thing in a more weighty situation?

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> who themselves have expressed a desire for people to respect their name

Some of whom have expressed that.

At this point, I see a single article with three listed authors. I have no idea what the opinion of those who self-identify as "Apache" is like. It could literally be anything in the range of "100% of Apaches oppose the name being used" to "(100% - 3) actively support the name in its current usage". My intuition is that the vast majority of those people don't have a strong opinion, and those that do are relatively evenly split - but I have no evidence for that, either.

Basically, if I were making the decision I'd listen to the concern and be open to acting on it, but would require a lot more justification than knowing that three people want it to be changed.

These kinds of attempts at language revision rarely have anything to do with the people supposedly offended by them; they are an excuse to gain moral standing. The goal is to advance a particular political ideology, namely Social Justice, which its advocates believe is in the best interest of said minorities and thus doesn't require the consent of those they choose to speak for.

To understand how much people care, it must be expressed in dollar terms. For example, you could ask the people who wrote the article to contribute to a fund that will maintain renamed forks of various Apache software projects. If their inclination to fundraise and donate isn't there, we can infer they don't care very much relative to the caring of the people who would actually have to do the work.

We could easily flip this and ask how much money the Apache Software Foundation is willing to pay the Apache tribes to use their name.

They don't own their name, no more than random Americans own the word "American" or random Brits own the word "English".

Hence "care" rather than anything to do with ownership or compulsion. Just because being kind isn't mandatory doesn't mean it's forbidden.

There can be social implications of course. In the same way that I can't compel people to call me "Andrew", I'll notice if someone goes out of their way to give me the wrong name after they've been asked nicely to. And so will others around me. That's not a big deal if it's someone I know cares for me, but if it's someone who used to bully me who is trying to convince me that they've changed then it's going to make it harder for me to believe they will act any differently from before.

> the people involved

Who are these people? They're certainly not representative of Native Americans overall. Just like demanding the use of "latinx", 99% of the supposedly affected minorities either don't care or would prefer to leave it as is. This kind of activism is by and for white people, especially the kind with lots of family money, lots of "education" but few marketable skills.

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